Sins of the Angels

by Linda Poitevin

  She scowled at the glossy black front door. She should never have agreed to drive all the way out to Oakville for the moron’s statement, just so the staff in his downtown office wouldn’t know about Daddy’s difficulties with his son. It would have been so much more sensible to have the Halton Regional Police Service do the interview for her. Oakville fell within their jurisdiction, after all. She gave a soft snort. Maybe she was the moron, not Stevens.

  She gazed down the long, empty sweep of driveway. Well, she was here now, so she might as well check around back to see if anyone was there. With a place this size, Stevens had to have hired help kicking around somewhere. Maybe they’d know when he was expected home.

  Heading down the stairs and across the lawn, she cursed as her designer shoes sank into the soft turf. Great. Now she’d have to have them cleaned, all because the mayor’s golfing buddy couldn’t let go of his adult son. Asshole.

  Speaking of the son, she still needed to get his side of the story, too. Daddy Stevens might not think it necessary, but Christine planned to err on the side of extreme thoroughness on this file. She had no intention of having it come back to bite her in the ass.

  She pulled out her cell phone, punched the Recent Calls button, selected Mitch Stevens’s name, and hit Auto Dial. If she could meet him on her way back to the office, her day might not feel like such a colossal waste. As she rounded the corner of the house, however, Mitch Stevens’s voice mail kicked in yet again.

  “Damn it, doesn’t anyone answer the phone anymore?” Christine waited for the tone and left another message, terser than the first two. She hung up as her shoe landed in something too soft to be lawn. Groaning, she froze. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  She stared at the dog crap under her foot for a moment and then raised a baleful face to whatever deities might occupy the sky. “If you’re trying to tell me this case is a pile of shit, I already figured that out,” she muttered. “You don’t have to rub it in.”

  ROBERTS TURNED AS Alex climbed out of her car. His forehead creased. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You see that ghost again?”

  Alex recoiled from her staff inspector’s ill-chosen words. Her hand, still quivering from its encounter with Trent, tightened its grip on the top edge of the driver’s door. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  Alex shrugged off his concern and reached into the car for the sunglasses she’d left on the dash. A hot wind, scented by exhaust fumes from the city four stories below, gusted across the rooftop parking lot and lifted the hair from her neck.

  Trent got out on the other side of the car. Alex eyed his stiff posture, turned her back on him, and slid her sunglasses into place on her nose.

  Roberts raised an eyebrow. “Something I should know about?”

  Still smarting from the dressing-down she’d received in her staff inspector’s office, Alex shook her head. “Nothing more than we already discussed.”

  Roberts grunted and turned back to the scene. “So has the circus started yet?”

  Alex knew he referred to the gathering of media she’d come through on the street below. She slammed the door and joined her supervisor beside the coroner’s vehicle. The sun’s harsh rays radiated back from the concrete at her feet. “Four more than I counted last night, including CNN. They’ve set up for live broadcasting this time.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  Alex turned her attention to the tarp-covered victim. In his cryptic phone call, Roberts had said the body looked to have been there for about a day, which meant it had been out in the rain and the scene had likely been washed clean. Again. She looked askance at her staff inspector.

  “We’re sure it’s the same guy?”

  “We’re sure.”

  That put the count at three in the last twenty-four hours. Their killer was escalating. Alex heard the scuff of a shoe against concrete and braced for Trent to join them.

  They hadn’t exchanged a word since she’d told him the subject of Roberts’s phone call. Eighteen minutes to maneuver through traffic and not a word, not a glance. Only a cold anger emanating from him like the chill from an iceberg, defying the day’s heat. If he’d been anyone else, she wouldn’t have hesitated to confront him, to demand an end to the bizarre behavior and tell him to take a flying leap off the nearest building if he couldn’t get his act together and behave like a decent human being.

  But he wasn’t anyone else.

  He was the man who had grown wings before her eyes. Twice.

  The man who’d left her reeling from a simple touch. Also twice.

  Alex pressed her lips together. “Has anyone run the plates yet?” she asked Roberts. When he shook his head in the negative, she took her notebook from her pocket and held it out to Trent. Her partner made no move to take it.

  “What’s that for?”

  “License plates. All the cars on this level.”

  She saw a muscle twitch in Trent’s jaw, but refused to back down. She continued holding out the notebook, silently defying him not to take it, and at last he reached out a hand. Alex maintained her grip, careful not to let his fingers touch hers, until he met her eyes.

  “Don’t forget to record the province if it’s not Ontario,” she said.

  Trent stalked over to the first parked car. Alex extracted her nails from her palms, then turned to her staff inspector. “Any word on that file yet?”

  “What file?” Roberts asked absently, his attention on his own note-taking.

  “Trent’s service record.”

  “Oh. That. Not yet.”

  “But you’re looking into it.”

  Temper flared in Roberts’s expression. “Was I not clear enough about this the first time around, Detective? I’d rather they sent us someone with experience, too, especially right now. But unless this asshole eases up, the administrative stuff isn’t going to happen and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

  She knew he was right. Knew that, in his shoes, she’d expect her to deal with it, too. But she didn’t have to like it. She eased her neck from side to side against the tension building there.

  “Fine,” she said. “So what do you want me—us—to do?”

  “I gave Troy and Williker the file. You can check with them to see if they need you to follow up on security cameras or anything, but otherwise just finish up the plates with Trent and have someone pull up the drivers’ licenses for comparison to the vic’s photo. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He nodded toward the surrounding buildings and the hundreds of windows looking down on the parking lot, too many to canvass with resources already stretched thin. “We’ll ask the media to put out a public appeal and see if anyone out there saw anything.”

  They both looked over as the head of Forensics passed by, clipboard in hand. Frustration was etched into every line of the man’s face and he shook his head in response to the unspoken question hanging in the air.

  “Of course not,” Roberts muttered. “How could I have possibly imagined they’d find something?”

  “He has to slip up at some point,” Alex said. “Maybe they’ll get something on the autopsy.”

  After five scenes without a scrap of evidence, however, her words sounded as hollow to her as she knew they did to her supervisor. Without responding, Roberts turned and headed for his own vehicle, parked near the top of the ramp. When he was gone, Alex settled her hands on her hips and stared at the covered body on the pavement beyond the barriers. Fingertips poked out on either side, and she didn’t need to see the familiar pose to know it was there: arms outstretched, ankles crossed. Neither did she need to see the gashes; deep, livid, exposing parts of the victim never meant to be seen.

  A familiar knot formed in her belly.

  Of all the weapons in the world, the killer had to use a blade. Couldn’t have just strangled his victims instead, or blown their faces off with a shotgun—just as messy, but so much less personal and, for her, so much less complicated.

  Alex looked
down the parking lot at the other complication in her life. She ran her gaze up Trent’s lean, powerful body, letting it come to rest on his profile. Her partner. A partner who inspired imagined wings and wild energy, and a certainty that he despised her on a level she’d never encountered.

  Along with a visceral response she’d never had to any man in her life.

  The knot in her belly snarled a little tighter. Fuck, she didn’t need this right now. Any of it. Not the case, not the memories, not the hormones, not the imagination gone berserk. She didn’t need that last one ever, but especially not now.

  Another year and she would have made it. Been in the clear. She would have passed that magic milestone in her mind, the age her mother had been when the madness had won. She could have begun to relax, to believe that maybe she wouldn’t be the same as her mother after all, that she wouldn’t inherit the voices, the delusions.

  The insanity.

  FROM THE CORNER of his eye, Aramael saw Alex’s determined, hands-on-hips approach. He suspected that even if he hadn’t seen her, he would have still felt the space between them closing; he had become that tuned in to her presence, that aware of her every move.

  He clutched the pen until it dug into his knuckles.

  He should be focused on the hunt. Should be directing all his energy toward tracking Caim, following the taint of evil that lingered, drawing ever closer to the confrontation with his brother. The capture.

  Instead, he was writing down license plate numbers. On the orders of a mortal. A Naphil whose very existence was a slap in Heaven’s face. Aramael jabbed pen against paper hard enough to dig through to the underlying sheet. A Naphil he’d been sent to defend and who had instead put him on the defensive and awakened a response that shouldn’t exist. Couldn’t exist.

  Alex’s steps neared. Aramael’s neck knotted.

  It had been bad enough the first time they had touched and she had seen him. Even then he’d felt a response to the recognition flaring in her eyes, a tug of something that had acted as a brake on his instinct to lash out.

  But the second time had been worse. So much worse. No urge for self-preservation had come to his defense. Not even a hint of one. Only that need to complete a connection between them. To reach out to her, to the descendant of a Grigori, and—

  Alex cleared her throat at his elbow.

  Aramael dug deep and found the edge of purpose that drove him. Clung to it as he turned to his charge.

  “Are you just about done?” Alex asked.

  He flipped the notebook shut in answer and held it out to her. She took it from him and tucked it back into her jacket pocket.

  “So,” she began.

  Bloody hell, he couldn’t continue like this.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  Alex studied him with guarded reservation. “About what?”

  “The killer.”

  “What about him? Or them?”

  “Him.”

  Alex lifted an eyebrow. “We have to consider the possibility there’s more than one—”

  “Him,” Aramael repeated.

  “You sound awfully sure of yourself, Detective. Care to share why?”

  “Not here.” He looked over her head and out across the city. He shouldn’t do this—shouldn’t even be considering it—but he had to do something, and Mittron and Verchiel had left him little choice. “Can we go somewhere else?”

  A pause. Then a scowl. “Fine. I’ll just see if they need us for anything here first.”

  “No.”

  Alex stopped in mid-swivel. Slowly turned back to face him again.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This is a waste of time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re not going to find him this way.”

  “All right,” she said, “then how will we find him?”

  “We need to talk,” he repeated. “But not here.”

  He saw her waver, her sense of duty warring with curiosity. At last she fished the car keys out of her pocket.

  “We’ll get a coffee,” she said. “You’re buying.”

  EIGHT

  Alex slid into the red vinyl booth across from Trent and righted her overturned cup to await coffee from the approaching waitress. Trent did not follow suit.

  “Not a coffee drinker?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Tea?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  Alex slid her cup to the edge of the table. She watched the waitress pour coffee, shook her head at the offer of a menu, and watched the woman depart again, headed for another booth near the door. Across the table, Trent stared out the window, jaw clenched, fingers drumming on the worn tabletop. Alex suppressed the urge to reach across and smack his hand into silence, partly because it would be rude, mostly because she didn’t dare touch him again.

  She picked up the sugar dispenser, dumped a rough teaspoon’s worth into her cup, and stirred her coffee. Then she set the spoon on a napkin she pulled from the dispenser. Determined to follow through on her decision—arrived at on the drive over—to try once again for a fresh start with her new partner, she cleared her throat.

  “So. Nothing like coming into a new section in the middle of chaos,” she said. “Talk about trial by fire.”

  “Are we going to talk about the killer or not?”

  For a moment, Alex was speechless. Then, when words threatened to return, she opted to drown them in a gulp of stale, lukewarm brew so she wouldn’t say something she probably shouldn’t.

  Like Kiss my ass.

  She scowled at the pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk, deciding she liked this man less and less with each of their encounters. Even without taking into account his propensity for sprouting feathered appendages or setting her soul on fire with the slightest touch.

  Maybe she should just flat-out refuse to work with him and take her lumps. Roberts wouldn’t be happy, but facing his displeasure couldn’t be any worse than this.

  Then again, how much worse could this get? If she and Trent could get past circling one another with raised hackles, and she could get past her unruly hormones, surely things would improve.

  If.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry if I offended you earlier, but I was just calling it like I see it, and what I see is someone who doesn’t know the first thing about investigating one murder, let alone a serial case. If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me; if I’m right, let it go. And if you can’t let it go, then for chrissake, ask Roberts to put you with another partner. Please.”

  Trent turned his face to the window. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I don’t want another partner.”

  Something in the way he grated the words made Alex study his profile with a fresh eye. It had nothing to do with her, she thought with sudden insight. He didn’t want any partner. He didn’t want to be here at all. She set down her mug with a determined thunk.

  “That’s it. I’ve had it,” she informed her partner. “Just what the hell is going on? Why were you assigned to Homicide? You don’t even want to be here—”

  Ferocity flashed in the gray depths of Trent’s eyes, so fast Alex almost missed it. So awful, she wished she had. For a millisecond, she remembered the rage she had seen in a winged man in the office. She swallowed. Thought she’d seen, she corrected herself. Only thought.

  Just as she’d only thought she’d seen wings, too.

  “Why?” she asked again. “Why are you here?”

  “Because I can catch him.”

  Alex might have laughed if the hairs on the back of her neck hadn’t been standing on end. She lifted a hand to smooth them down. Outside the window, a flare of lightning illuminated a street gone gloomy beneath clouds she hadn’t noticed until now. She glared at the man across from her.

  “Let me get this straight. We have an entire police force out looking for this prick, we’re using every forensic procedure at our disposal, every profiler, and you think you’re the one who will find
him? And just how, pray tell, are you planning to do that?”

  “I can feel him.”

  Well. What this guy lacked in experience, he certainly made up for in balls. Alex picked up her coffee again and shot him a look of exasperation. “Newsflash, Detective Trent. You don’t hold the monopoly on a cop’s instinct.”

  “It’s not instinct,” Trent said, his voice deadly quiet.

  Alex’s hand froze with the cup hovering near her mouth. She so didn’t like the way this man’s reality seemed to operate. Or the way it skewed her own.

  “It’s fact.” Trent leaned over the table. His glare bored into her, held her immobile. “When he stalks a victim, I feel him. When he kills that victim, I feel him. I feel his hunger, his need, his desperation. And it’s just a matter of time until I’m close enough to catch him.”

  Alex was sure she must look as stupid as she felt, with her jaw hanging slack and her eyebrows raised so high that her forehead felt stretched. But she couldn’t help it. Because she didn’t know how else to look when her new partner suddenly announced his psychic ability.

  And she’d been worried about her own sanity?

  With great deliberation, she set her cup back in its saucer. “You know,” she said, reaching for her car keys, “I think we’re done—”

  Trent lifted a hand in a sudden, imperious gesture.

  Alex raised just one eyebrow this time. “Excuse me?”

  “Quiet.”

  Trent had gone rigid, his whole attitude one of intense concentration, alert to something she couldn’t see or hear. Thunder rumbled faintly through the glass beside them, vibrating down Alex’s spine alongside a sudden chill.

  Her partner bolted from the booth. “He’s near.”

  Alex’s hand jerked, overturning her coffee cup. “Shit!”

  She hastily righted the cup, then pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and dabbed at the stain spreading down the front of her white cotton blouse, then at the coffee spilling over the edge of the table. She tried to remember if she had a clean shirt in her locker and jumped anew as Trent plucked the napkins from her hand.